The Weak In Rock

Have a happy new year.

Well, the response to my first music mix was a resounding snore. I’ll try to buck up and ignore the cataclysmic roar of indifference and blame it all on the holiday season. Yeah, that’s it. You were all too busy trying to talk yourselves out of murdering your relatives to tune in. Ok, I’ll forgive you and give you a new podcast to chew on.

Here’s the playlist (this time minus the commentary):

1. Jawbreaker - Do You Still Hate Me?
2. Van Halen - Sinners Swing
3. Joy Division - Novelty
4. Echo & The Bunnymen - The Cutter
5. Nick Drake - Parasite
6. Elvis Presley - I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine
7. LL Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out
8. Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson - Too Many Woman Blues
9. Man… or Astroman? - Put Your Finger In The Socket
10. The Byrds - You Don’t Miss Your Water
11. Tammy Wynette - D-I-V-O-R-C-E
12. Alice Cooper - I Love The Dead
13. The Beatles - Fixing A Hole
14. Rocket From The Crypt - Come See, Come Saw
15. The Beat - Walking Out On Love
16. Charles Brown - Driftin’ Blues
17. Green Day - Stuart & The Ave.
18. Cheap Trick - You’re All Talk (Albini version)
19. The Creatures - Pluto Drive
20. Van Halen - Eruption
21. Patton Oswalt - The Gay Pride Parade
22. Supersuckers - Ron’s Got The Cocaine

Once again, enjoy.

Last year I made a feeble, furtive attempt at podcasting and figured out two things:

1. I’m not vain enough to think that anyone really wants to listen to me yammer.
2. Audio files take up a buttload of file server space.

But I still like the idea of doing internet radio shows. So I came to the conclusion that I would try again once I got the right tools, so here goes folks. The Weak In Rock Radio Hour, vol. 1.

Here’s the playlist and some commentary:

• James Brown - Out of Sight: I’ve said it many times; I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t feel like dancing the minute they hear a good James Brown song and this is a great one.
• Lewis Black - Homeland Security: I agree, Tom Ridge had all the leadership qualities of a rodent.
• Patrice Rushen - Forget Me Nots: just a damned fine and funky song.
• Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Blank Generation: often immitated, never improved upon.
• Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water: overplayed to death when I was a kid, but still one of the immortal guitar riffs.
• Paul McCartney & Wings - You Gave Me The Answer: pure pop goodness.
• Adam Ant - Apollo 9: one of the most fun and silliest songs of the 80s
• Van Halen - So This Is Love: oh how the mighty have fallen. Just listen to that guitar.
• Hues Corporation - Rock The Boat: more danceable goodness.
• Chuck Berry - Havana Moon: ok, so he likes to poop on people, that doesn’t make his music any less great.
• Hayseed Dixie - Christine Sixteen: for some this would be sacrilege, for me it’s a massive improvement.
• Santo & Johnny - Sleepwalk: i love surf instrumentals to death and this is a great one.
• Tom T. Hall - I Like Beer: silly.
• The Who - See Me Feel Me: another song that got played to death when I was a kid, but hardly sees the light of day these days.
• The Pixies - River Euphrates: 90s alternarock goodness.
• OutKast - Knowing: funny how I keep referring to this band here every December.
• Buzzcocks - I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life: pop punk glory at its finest.
• Kristen Hersh - Sundrops: just gorgeous music.
• The Replacements - Answering Machine: back when Paul Westerberg could do heartbreaking at the drop of a hat.

That’s all folks. Happy holidays.

Such a strange feeling overcame me this morning as I read about Johnny Damon signing with the Yankees - I actually started to like the Yankees. You see anyone who makes Red Sox fans miserable gets mad props from me. Like I’ve said before, the Yankees are merely metaphorically evil while the Red Sox are genuinely evil.

Apparently the so-called Red Sox Nation is up in arms. Someone even posted Damon’s soul for sale on eBay last night (eBay naturally took the posting down, since they’re obviously Yankees fans). All I can say is MUWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Wouldn’t it be lovely if they actually traded Manny too? How bad would the Red Sox suck next year without a leadoff hitter (and great center fielder) and the most dangerous power hitter in the AL?

Now if Theo Epstein was still GM of the Red Sox he’d just shrug and say “so what folks, we’ve got a great farm system, loads of prospects and the smarts to know how to fix the holes in our club without having to sell the farm.” Then he’d do something inspired like sign Eric Byrnes (who was non-tendered by the Orioles yesterday) who mashes lefty pitching and covers more ground in the outfield than practically anyone on two legs, and does it in a way that entertains the hell out of the fans. He’d also point out that the Yankee pitching staff is still largely composed of geriatrics who let them down in a big way last year, and that the one guy who shined on the mound for them, Aaron Small, has still not been offered a deal.

But alas for the Red Sox fans, Theo left the building months ago. So probably the team that makes the most hay out of this is the Blue Jays, who’ve made lots of smart off-season moves, were pretty darned good last season to begin with, and who have a GM who wants to win NOW.

I’ll look forward to watching the Red Sox twist in the wind in 2006.

So, Dubya has bunged up many, many things during his time served as President, but up until recently he’d managed to avoid doing anything impeachment-worthy. Now he’s done it.

By admitting that he ordered the NSA to secretly wiretap phone conversations and emails of US citizens inside of the United States without going through the standard intelligence review process required by law George W. Bush committed a felony. I’ll put it all in black and white for you:

There is no room for doubt or question about whether the President has the prerogative to order surveillance without asking the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] — even if the FISC is a toothless organization that never turns down requests, it is a federal crime, punishable by up to five years imprisonment, to conduct electronic surveillance against US citizens without court authorization.

The FISC may be worthless at defending civil liberties, but in its arrogant disregard for even the fig leaf of the FISC, the administration has actually crossed the line into a crystal clear felony. The government could have legally conducted such wiretaps at any time, but the President chose not to do it legally.

Ours is a government of laws, not of men. That means if the President disagrees with a law or feels that it is insufficient, he still must obey it. Ignoring the law is illegal, even for the President. The President may ask Congress to change the law, but meanwhile he must follow it.

The above quote is from Perry E. Metzger who moderates a mailing list on cryptography. You can read more about this subject here.

It was about 13 years ago that Dubya’s daddy declared the end to the Cold War and that the experiment of Communism had univerasally failed. Well ha ha on him. Evo Morales appears to have won Bolivia’s Presidential election. This means that Bolivia joins Chile, Venezuela and Brazil among the South American nations who have swung widely to the left in the past few years.

What’s this all about, I hear my fellow country-people saying, largely willfully ignorant of anything happening anywhere but Hollywood these days. What it’s about is the IMF and WTO policies totally backfiring on the US and European bankers who run both organizations. The IMF has repeatedly strong-armed third world countries into “reforming” their monetary policies, which has without exeception been disasterous for all but the very rich in these nations. The result is a swelling of the ranks of the working poor who find the concept of worker controlled industry and reallocation of national wealth very appealing.

The irony here is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a Ginsu. Reagan/Bush stomped the USSR into economic submission by forcing them into an arms race that bankrupted the Soviet system. The Berlin Wall fell, and eastern Europe has been remade into a source of cheap labor for European industry and the stability we’d come to enjoy in the third world due to the counter-balance of ideological conflict between the US and USSR went up in a puff of smoke.

Not only did the US create Osama bin Laden out of whole cloth in order to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan (in a very successful attempt to give the USSR their version of the Vietnam War) ultimately resulting the 9/11/01 attacks on NYC and Washington, but by eliminating Soviet global economic power as well and creating organizations like the IMF and WTO, that largely cater to US industrial interests, we’ve sown the seeds for Socialism to spread throughout South and Central America. It’s really amazing. What Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao could not accomplish Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush-Lite have managed to pull off rather rapidly.